Herman Cain: ‘Let them eat cake’

“Don’t blame Wall Street,” Cain said. “Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.”

Contemptible! Does this man know any unemployed people? Here’s something from an “Open Letter” to Wall Street, re: the protesters on its doorstep, that Cain ought to consider:

They look all kinds of silly in their outfits, and some of their statements don’t make a whole lot of sense to people like you, but they have put down roots, and you better get used to them. I’m sure the whole phenomenon is quite perplexing to you – really, why don’t they just go home? Don’t these people have jobs?

I hate to be the Irony Police, but that’s pretty much the whole point. They can’t, and they don’t. Have homes and jobs, I mean. There was a guy out there a few days ago holding a sign in front of a mortgage-lending institution that read “These People Took My Parent’s Home.” There are all sorts of people walking around Wall Street yelling their lungs out at you because, well, they really would like the opportunity to find gainful employment, as well as a future, but that nifty shell game you and yours pulled off (on our dime) wound up immolating the economy of the common man/woman, and so the common man/woman has decided – in lieu of anything else better to do – to spend their you-created idle hours on your doorstep.

Let’s face it: the mess outside your office is your doing. You and your friends bought this democracy wholesale – ah, yes, the irony of freedom is found in the way you were able to corrupt so many legislators with your money, always legally, because the legislators you bought are the ones writing the laws covering political contributions, and thus the wheel of corruption turns and turns – and now you want this democracy to do your bidding after the bill for your excess and fathomless greed has come due.

I can’t buy into the idea that the People are entirely virtuous, and the Bankers have been wholly evil. My view is that what has happened to us economically is the result of a widespread corruption of the virtues necessary for self-government. But I am a firm believer in the Biblical principle that to whom much is given, much is expected. The surprising thing is not that Wall Street is now being protested against. The surprising thing is that it has taken so long. And the embarrassing thing to conservatives is that the Left got there first. At least it should be the embarrassing thing.

I say this not as someone who endorses the goals of this group of protesters. What are their goals, anyway? Do they even know? I give one-and-a-half cheers to the protesters for doing something. The fact that they drew this kind of response from Herman Cain is hugely telling. His is a pure example of the Republican Id. As a conservative, I cannot understand why so many ordinary conservatives don’t appear to have the slightest concern over the way Wall Street economic elites behaved, how the hugely irresponsible acts of those men have dramatically diminished the job prospects and stability of ordinary people, and how these wealthiest-of-the-wealthy have captured both political parties for their own interests. But it’s true. As I wrote the other day, Baylor University recently released social science research showing that among non-blacks, the less well educated and less well-off you are, the more likely you are to be religiously observant, believe that poverty is one’s own fault, and that God means for some to be rich and some to be poor. In other words, the same classes that make natural conservative populists have strong cultural reasons for denying that there are structural problems with our economic system that unjustly favor the interests of the very rich, at the expense of the great masses of ordinary Americans.

Now, one of the most interesting things about pre-fabricated political identities is that they come as package deals. There is no logical connection whatsoever between supporting a woman’s right to abort an unwanted fetus and supporting subsidies for alternative energy. The strong cultural correlation between these stances creates an illusion of ideological coherence. Since most of us aren’t political theorists, we tend not to see that the force determining the various planks in our favoured party’s platform is the drive to craft a winning coalition cobbled together from diverse and sometimes conflicting interest groups, not Truth. So, if changing material circumstance nudges us toward a clear preference for the safety-net party, we tend to find ourselves drawn into a larger, ready-made “liberal” cultural sensibility that leads us to see “the business coalition as greedy bastards” and to develop a sense that people whose work leads them to identify with the other party “are clueless about what really matters in life”.

I think the paradox, or the irony, is that the evolution of partisan coalitions can lead to bizarrely incoherent partisan worldviews. Easy money in a recession is the objectively pro-business position. However, the rising preeminence on the right of the idea that inflation, like taxation, is largely a mechanism of unjust big-government expropriation can, through mere association, make this viewpoint seem like the “pro-business” one, even if it isn’t. It’s this kind of drift in the composition and ideology of partisan coalitions that can make even debate over economic policy seem like just one more front in the culture war.

This is why conservative people who ought to have at least some sympathy for the Wall Street protesters likely see them as Herman Cain does: as layabouts who are demonstrating when they ought to be out there getting a job. And this is why liberal people who ought to be seriously questioning the relationship of the Democratic Party to Wall Street aren’t going to press Barack Obama as they ought: because culturally, he’s one of them. The culture war continues to be the defining conflict in American life.

And I should add that while Dreher wrote, “It is simply a fact that on the Right today, there is no constituency for breaking up concentrations of wealth and power, except government wealth and government power,” I assume that he meant to add the phrase, when Democrats are in power.

Herman Cain is, for now, the Tea Party candidate. I would bet my next paycheck that his “let them eat cake” remark will not hurt him with the Tea Party, but will probably even help him. The Tea Party is the only expression of conservative populism we have. These facts tell us a lot, all of it depressing.

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27 Responses to Herman Cain: ‘Let them eat cake’

Can we stop with the pretense that the Tea Party is distinct political reality? It’s merely an attempt to re-brand the Republican Party by its rump to evade accountability for having enthusiastically elected the last Republican administration, twice.

I suspect Cain’s thinking is that he as a black man born in the segregated South had to overcome far worse than 99% of these self-proclaimed 99%ers, and making lots of ruckus in the streets (any giant puppets yet?) sure wasn’t how he overcame it. And he’s right of course, so I’ll cut him a little slack–it’s not quite as grotesque as it would be coming from Mitt Romney, for example. But this should be an easy time for someone to remind people of the fact that NOT everyone supported TARP, i.e., the Goldman Sachs bailout bill, and NOT everyone supported all the other big bailout nonsense. But Cain’s a product of big business, through and through, so to expect him to be for the little guy (or the little business) isn’t realistic. Oh well.

I can understand you not wanting to buy into an incorrect dichotomy of protesters Good, bankers Evil. But that’s not necessary, to endorse the plain truth of that final part of the letter:

“You and your friends bought this democracy wholesale – ah, yes, the irony of freedom is found in the way you were able to corrupt so many legislators with your money, always legally, because the legislators you bought are the ones writing the laws covering political contributions, and thus the wheel of corruption turns and turns – and now you want this democracy to do your bidding after the bill for your excess and fathomless greed has come due.”

Looking at the mobs, and that is what they are, I am reminded of the day before the Equal Rights Amendment died in the Illinois Senate. There was a huge demonstration in downtown Chicago and one state legislator watching it said, “I don’t see any of my constituents in this.” And the Illinois State Senate refused to ratify the amendment, killing it. And not one legislator who voted against it lost his seat.

If I were a Republican strategist, I could easily paint this as the face of the Democratic party and use it to sweep the next elections. The Republicans have nothing to fear from this, very few of their voters are there so they can pretty much ignore the people who are. And if they play their cards right…

I noticed awhile back that the Republican side tends to say “If someone is poor, they have only themselves to blame. They just need to stop being lazy and spend what money they have more wisely.” Then the Democrats say “If someone is poor, it is all society’s fault, and the government should help them.” When the reality is that usually people are poor due to a combination of the two.

Lynching the management of Goldman-Sachs would be a good start. I’m mostly kidding.

I can’t buy into the idea that the People are entirely virtuous, and the Bankers have been wholly evil.

Anyone who observes the People or works with them, etc., in a political context, eventually feels like the Marxist in the old joke who wants to dissolve the People and elect a new one! Having said this, the Founder of our religion, while not notably sentimental or unrealistic about the People, directed almost all of his invective against the wealthy–even the honest wealthy, the “self-made” wealthy. I don’t think it’s necessarily a contradiction to realize the people are flawed and partly responsible for our society’s mess while at the same time reserving the massive majority of the blame, both practically and morally, for the plutocrats of Wall Street.

The whole package deal ideology thing is why, in my view, we’d be better off with a quasi-parliamentary system in which a larger number of parties could flourish. The two-party system corrupts the discourse, since everything gets drawn to one side or the other, regardless of the logic (or lack thereof) of its fit (or lack of fit) with everything else. If there were more room for parties with fewer issues which held together better, it would be a good start, in my view.

Well, there are a disturbing amount, among the protesters, of indebted children with Midget Studies degrees who couldn’t even do the slightest amount of research to discover that there was no viable career path for this field of study. I’m amazed sometimes at the stupidity of my generation.

Cain’s sentiments are precisely the reason why I am no longer a G.O.P. conservative and not even a complete free market capitalist any more. When my father was 18 years old (circa 1965) there were quite a number of places around the San Francisco Bay Area where he could find employment as a “walk in” and make a decent living (enough to raise a family with and build a future for them). That’s not the case any more. I blame the global free traders, I blame the Republicans and Democrats for NAFTA and CAFTA and our membership in the WTO. I blame the Federal Reserve for devaluing our hard earned savings.

I also blame my peers and the generation that came before us for seeking the “good life” instead of vigilantly protecting American manufacturing (American jobs) and thus the American dream of one day becoming financially independent based on the fruits of our labor. I blame myself as well. I was partying while Wall Street was gambling with my future and the future of my then future children. Now I am not. Now I am a husband with a wife and children and a union job. Now is my time to be vigilant.

I still consider myself a conservative all though to the Adam Smith free marketeers I am most definitely a heretic. I have come to the belief that the Wall Street bankers and their friends in Washington will continue stealing from the average American family and will complete their destruction of the Middle Class unless we take our government back and brand them as traitors and criminals and send them to the Alaskan tundra to break rocks.

As for the issue of poverty. There is definitely the problem of free loaders in this country, but with the current economic climate it is hard to tell the free loaders from those who just received a pink slip. I say bring back the industry and get the workers back to work and then we can kick the free loaders off of welfare because they’ll have no excuse when they can walk down to the nearest factory and get a job.

My main concern is the disappearing Middle Class of which I fall into. For decades now we have bought into this idea that collective bargaining is bad for business and if we only got rid of all the government regulations we would still have our manufacturing base. However this is clearly not the case. Corporate greed is the case. Why else would all these corporations relocate their manufacturing to South East Asia and even to countries where the Communist Party (even if they’re only Communist in name) is still in power and people get paid a fraction of an American wage

I have come to find American politics terminally stupid, and Mr. Cain and his wretched minstrel show are a prime example of said stupidity.I know Mr. Cain has mentioned his Christian faith and I am wondering whether it is some sort of prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism. His comment has strong hint of that type of faith.

I am 31 yrs. old and from my point of view pretty much everything about America is discredited. I’ve watched over the past several years as everything I believed was discredited and all my hard work come to nothing. While not endorsing the protesters, as a conservative, the dismissal of them and their moment as a bunch of losers by so many so-called conservatives, with nothing of value to say is really starting to piss me off. Herman Cain is another petty hustler, of the type that has reduced this country to the dysfunctional mess it is. I have ancestral ties through my mother’s side to both Sweden and Finland, and have relatives there, and I have been seriously considering moving there. The reason, there isn’t much populism is that much of the American public deep down are hustlers on the make just like their leaders. They don’t hate the hustlers, because they themselves are on the make and aspire to climb to the top of the dung heap. The American public are debased and their debased leaders are simply a reflection of them and what our society is capable of producing.

I took a morning off work amd went down to check out the scene. I’m not a fan of protests generally, but I’m even less a fan of Wall Street, and so tried to keep an open mind.

I was angry and depressed with what I saw. Hippies, drum circles, anarchist chic, and wild-eyed village liberals hung around waving cardboard signs about how they can’t get jobs. It was enough to make me forget how bad the job market really is.

Much more disturbing was the young teoublemaker who interrupted discussions with passersby by telling them to ‘go back to Israel, Jew!” Nobody stopped him. At last I spoke up and said it was inappropriate; he told me to shut up and that he was Jewish, so it was okay.

This is a big problem for liberals. There’s just a huge divide between the technocrats like myself and the loonies who wind up sabotaging us. They need to do their primal scream.

I have no tribal need to affiliate with Obama, but I love his pragmatism. I wish these protesters would learn from that.

Earlier this year, I did a paper on the Tea Party (comparing it to the Boston Tea Party and other post-Revolutionary rebellions) . What I learned is that in the very early meetings of the Tea Party, there was anger over the corporate bailouts and tax money used for it. However, Dick Armey, et al. stepped out in front and started acting as the media presence for the tea party (who by choice did not have any leaders). The left was asleep or too buoyed by Obama winning that they neglected to realize that this was a true populist uprising. They could have gotten in front of it or at least joined forces on what the two sides agreed on. It is not a populist movement any longer. Now it’s another shill of the corprotocracy (or however it’s spelled).

Park I agree with you. First we need to take back acts of protest from the college loonies and the other clowns you always see at these things. If we are going to build any kind of movement to take on the Wall Street banks and the political elite in this country then the clowns really have to get to the back of the bus while the average middle class worker has to take the front. It’s not that I have anything against the college loonies in particular its just that they give your protest the hippie stench and that’s a stench you don’t particularly want if you want to be taken seriously. Another thing I would get rid of is this hippie protest tradition of locking your hands together. It would be better that if the authorities push we push back instead of this Ghandi type action. I want to see more Jimmy Hoffa and less Ghandi. I also want to see more bullhorns and we should be telling the cops that they’re protecting the wrong side. Most of them are middle class family men of the working class. It’s not in their interest to protect the bankers.

“Well, there are a disturbing amount, among the protesters, of indebted children with Midget Studies degrees who couldn’t even do the slightest amount of research to discover that there was no viable career path for this field of study. I’m amazed sometimes at the stupidity of my generation.”

Those seeking to “occupy Wall Street” should call themselves “The Original Tea Party,” and do this in style, with revolutionary-war era uniforms, fifes and drums.

The Tea Party is many different things, not a coherent organized movement, caucus, or party. There is little doubt that the “Chicago Tea Party” speech by Santelli was a pathetic broker’s rant, and had been planned for months. But the first trickle of grass roots turn-out were people angered by… massive taxpayer funded bail outs of Wall Street, which began under Bush. One of Obama’s big mistakes was to take on Summers and Geithner and continue the program, instead of breaking up anything too big to fail and too broke to survive without subsidy, selling off the pieces in sizes not to big to fail next time around.

Then, the professional Republican consultants like Sal Russo, and the southern lawyer huckster who organized the Nashville “convention” to make himself a tidy profit, hijacked the label. But it doesn’t particularly belong to them. The protesters on Wall Street have as good a right to the label as any, and better than many. It is true there is more wrong with America than Wall Street. But it is not a bad place to begin.

Although I agree with Rod’s criticism, I’m still willing to support Cain for the nomination (assuming Ron Paul doesn’t catch fire). As a child of poverty, I think he will be more sympathetic to populist policies than a Romney. When it comes to foreign policy, his inexperience could be a plus or minus whether things change. The verdict is still out.

We had the same problem with the anti-war protests and the environmental movement. It’s hard to persuade people when your appearance itself is a turn-off. MLK seemed to understand that but he’s the last person I can think of that understood that a protest movement needs to have the general population identify with THEM not the people they’re protesting.

Will Wilkinson: “Now, one of the most interesting things about pre-fabricated political identities is that they come as package deals. There is no logical connection whatsoever between supporting a woman’s right to abort an unwanted fetus and supporting subsidies for alternative energy. The strong cultural correlation between these stances creates an illusion of ideological coherence.”

Wilkinson’s analysis reminded me of a memorable passage from The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics (1979) by Peter Steinfels, still an engrossing, nimble and deeply-researched backgrounder on how we reached our present battlegrounds. Steinfels suspects that few

“reflective people have not experienced the irritation of having someone assume they must automatically be ‘for’ A because they favor B. This can be silly enough in the political sphere alone–because you opposed sending arms and troops to Vietnam, you must (it is assumed) oppose sending arms and troops to the Middle East or to NATO. When totally different spheres are linked, the effect is absurd: thus if you are critical of capitalism, you must favor greater sexual permissiveness on TV, experimental novels, solar energy, anti-discrimination statutes for homosexuals and campaigns against cigarette smoking!”

Cain makes the same mistake many ‘self made’ individuals is the business world make. He assumes his specific circumstances will apply to all situations. They won’t. You get this attitude from everyone to small business owners to major CEO’s, regardless of how they got where they are.

The inability to see the importance of luck, of being in the right place at the right time, is a serious blind spot among many ‘self made’ business types.

As deplorable as may be the actions of many big players on Wall St., it’s unfair to fault them without placing a larger share of complicity in this economic horrow story on government. After all, without government there is no “crony capitalism” and it’s the government that creates the environment for bad Wall St. behavior (e.g. through tax policies, subsidies, and/or regulations that exempt favored economic actors over others).

Darryl B., you’re right, to a point — but think about how much Wall Street has captured both political parties. In the late 1990s, the Clinton Administration, led by its chief economic advisers Larry Summers and Robert Rubin (both Wall Street vets) worked with Congressional Republican bigs to deregulate the Wall Street banks, removing Depression-era firewalls. The entire mentality was: “Wall Street can do no wrong.” Campaign contributions flowed freely to both parties. When it comes to Wall Street, there really is only one party.